Ninetynine

NinetyNine, the casiopunk art-pop outfit, started as Laura Macfarlane’s solo venture after she had drummed for Seattle indie rock band Sleater-Kinney under the credit Lora MacFarlane. Although headquartered in Melbourne, the group has logged extensive international tours and accumulated a larger following in distant territories such as Finland than in its home country. Macfarlane performed every instrument on the band’s self-titled debut album, issued in 1996. She later brought in additional multi-instrumentalists to create a standard band format in which members periodically exchanged roles between songs or even within them. The first recruits were Rhonda Simmonds and Cameron Potts, both arriving in 1997.

That year the expanded lineup recorded the second album, 767, with Simmonds handling bass, Potts and Macfarlane dividing duties on drums, vibraphone, and the group’s trademark Casiotone keyboards, and Macfarlane also covering guitars, vocals, and xylophone. Simmonds soon exited to join Origami, after which Iain McIntyre assumed the bass chair. This configuration produced the 2000 album 180 Degrees. McIntyre’s stay was short-lived; he was replaced by Amy Clarke in time for the 2002 release The Process, which marked NinetyNine’s first use of a professional recording studio. The same year also brought the rarities compilation Anatomy of Distance.

For the 2003 EP Receiving the Sounds of Science Fiction the band experimented with distribution by offering the record exclusively through New York’s Dark Beloved Cloud singles club, where each purchaser hand-designed artwork that served as the cover for copies sent to other members. Amy Clarke departed in 2006 and was succeeded by Meg Butler, the year the group released Worlds of Space, Worlds of Population, Worlds of Robots.